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Thursday, 18 December 2014

Here's a well-researched and well-argued article that, after investigation, reliably shows that the presence of food banks doesn't mean that welfare cheques are not high enough, but only that "sometimes the state messes up benefit payments and leaves nasty delays. They prove that people aren’t good at managing money. They suggest that not everyone puts rent and food before fags and booze (but we don’t want to get into a discussion about the deserving and the undeserving here). They confirm that supply creates its own demand."

My disagreement with the writer is that she seems to be in favour of a welfare state, even overly munificent, and that she attributes the current state of affairs - in which working members of society practically support and maintain in a comfortable lifestyle generation after generation of non-working members - to the altruism of individuals.

I think instead that people pay excessive taxes not because they are philanthropic but because they don't have the courage to rebel against them, as they haven't had the courage to rebel against Islamisation and unlimited immigration.

Spontaneous, individual charity is a sign of a moral spirit and improves the character of the giver without corrupting that of the recipient. Imposed charity is just tyranny by the state.

Below are the astonishing results of the author's research, confirming what we already knew, namely that benefit claimants are paid for doing nothing much more than the average worker earns for devoting almost half of his waking life to a job.

Having read a good amount recently on food banks in the UK this week, I had a little wander around the benefits system. I looked at a postcode in the southeast of England to see just how much you get from the welfare state in the UK if you aren’t working at all.

I started with a couple with two children and added up their housing benefit, jobseeker’s allowance, tax credits and child benefit. The result? A tax-free income of £24,269. That’s the equivalent of an earned (and hence taxable) income of £32,000. That’s very significantly more than the number we are always given as the UK’s average wage.

Then I looked at a single mother with two kids. Her payments come out to just under £24,000, so again an earned income equivalent of just under £32,000.

Finally, I looked at a single unemployed man of working age. His benefit payments in the same area come to a tax-free total of £12,300 with £7,600 of that being housing benefit. I then looked up the accommodation available to rent at that price or less in the area. Rightmove provided 68 pages of possibilities.

Now, none of these amounts add up to fortunes. But they don’t add up to anything approaching absolute poverty either. Live frugally and stay out of debt, and things should be fine. Not exactly luxurious, but fine.

Not once, but twice he has been caught on tape saying that the "stupidity of the American voter" made a certain amount of duplicity necessary to the passage of Obamacare.

The first time was during the panel sessions at the 2013 Annual Health Economics Conference, the video of which you can see above. (The relevant remarks are at 20:25.) The video surfaced in November of this year.

"This bill was written in a tortured way to make sure CBO [Congressional Budget Office, a federal agency that provides budget and economic information to Congress] did not score the mandate as taxes," he said. "Lack of transparency is a huge political advantage. And basically, call it the 'stupidity of the American voter' or whatever, but basically that was really, really critical to getting the thing to pass.”

"In terms of risk-rated subsidies, if you had a law which explicitly said that healthy people pay in and sick people get money, it would not have passed," he added. "You can't do it politically, you just literally cannot do it. It's not only transparent financing but also transparent spending."

The National Interestobserves in the piece "How One Man Could Obliterate Obamacare":

Obamacare is largely a Medicaid expansion plus churn between old health-insurance plans and new Obamacare-compliant ones, so far achieving modest gains in coverage at the cost of higher premiums and reduced access for many.

It's hard to imagine the stupid American voter would be enamored of this, if smart people like Jonathan Gruber had deigned to explain it to them at the time.

Liberals quickly disowned Gruber's impolitic observations. Some even insisted it was the most transparent debate ever, as suits the most transparent administration in history...

Gruber-gate is important for a few reasons besides the normal political "gotcha" game. First, it reminds us that Obamacare's losers will remain a vital part of the repeal constituency. The mobilization of such people was essential to rolling back the Medicare catastrophic coverage expansion of the 1980s, one of the most prominent examples of a broad-based entitlement being repealed in the post–New Deal era.

Second, it is a fitting window into how the technocrats view the masses. You might have liked the health plan you already had, but Jonathan Gruber knows it was bare-boned and terrible. The liberals truly are the best and the brightest.

But the excuses about his speech subsequently offered by Gruber, the Democrats and their supporters have been refuted by similar utterances on his part.

Another video surfaced showing Gruber speaking at an October 2013 event at Washington University in St. Louis, once again claiming that the Obamacare's authors took advantage of the "stupid" American people.

Referring to the so-called "Cadillac tax" on high-end health plans, he said: "They proposed it and that passed, because the American people are too stupid to understand the difference."

Republican Senator John Barrasso told Fox News: "It confirms people's greatest fear about the government. Remember, it was [California Democrat] Nancy Pelosi who said first you have to pass it before you get to find out what's in it.

"We knew it was written in a way that it was really deliberately written to deceive the American people, and now people are paying the price."

And that's not enough:

The Obamacare architect had already become Exhibit A in the Halbig v. Burwell case, now on its way to the Supreme Court, which could potentially make people who bought health insurance through the federal exchange ineligible for subsidies.

Little-noticed comments made by Gruber in 2012 could unravel the Affordable Care Act and offer the law's conservative challengers a major boost in the most high-profile ongoing challenge to undo it.

Republicans say they will try once again to repeal the health-care law, described by Robert E. Moffit, senior fellow in The Heritage Foundation’s Center for Health Policy Studies, as a disaster, or at least change its most controversial provisions.

This is a conversation I heard. She: "Do we have a card with Jesus on it?" He: "No, we only have Christmas cards".

This exchange may go some way to explain the tragicomic results of recent research.

A survey of 2,000 UK families carried out in early December showed that a third of children aged 10-13 do not know that Christmas celebrates the birth of Jesus.

It’s shocking but hardly surprising, as Christ has been progressively removed from Christmas.

But the problem does not concern just kids. According to the same survey, half the population considers Jesus’s birth irrelevant to their Christmas celebrations, and only 1 adult in 10 can correctly state 4 facts about the Nativity.

Therefore, it’s safe to assume that the children just reflect the ignorance and disinterest of their parents.

The research was commissioned by the campaign group Christmas Starts With Christ. Francis Goodwin, a campaigner for the group, said: “There is a problem with political correctness in schools. They think they should not focus on the Christian roots of Christmas because of inclusivity.”

Schools are becoming so “inclusive” that many of them are not putting on Nativity plays for fear of offending people of different religions, and this survey shows in very clear, ominous terms the consequences of that trend.

Then there is the research conducted by the online parenting group Netmums, which found that only 1 in 3 schools are staging a traditional Nativity play this month.

The research also unearthed that schools these days prefer to stage modern musicals instead. Almost half of them now perform “modernised” Christmas shows with footballers - which could explain the results of another survey, below - and punk fairies in place of the shepherds, Mary, Joseph and Baby Jesus. 1 in 8 school plays will have no religious references at all, but only eco-warriors or aliens or Elvis.

If we don’t stand up for Christianity, the religion that has given birth to and sustained the West will disappear from our lands. We, or our descendants, might discover that this loss spells the end of Western civilization, as an infinite number of signs already indicate.

Another survey was conducted a few days ago at London’s Brent Cross Shopping Centre, a veritable pre-Christmas nightmarish place. The association of Christmas with shopping persists. This is most incongruous, as the materialism and acquisitiveness of which Christmas has become the expression is totally at odds with the Christian message.

In this research, more than half of 5-to-12-year-olds thought that Christmas Day is Santa Claus' birthday.

A total of 1,000 children at Brent Cross were shown an iconic image of Jesus and told that it portrayed Jesus.

Monday, 15 December 2014

For once we have riots that are not by anti-white black protesters — to whose violence Ferguson, among others, has accustomed us — but by indigenous Europeans defending their land against invaders.

In Rome, on the night of 10–11 November, a group of residents of the Tor Sapienza suburb living in public housing attempted to assault the local centre for refugees and asylum seekers incongruously named “Il sorriso” (The Smile), throwing stones and bottles and setting dumpsters on fire, amidst broken glass and screams of “We want to burn you”.

The reception centre houses over 40 youths — Gambians, Congolese, Ethiopians and other Africans, plus Afghans and Syrians — rescued from their boats crossing the Mediterranean.

The local residents have long been concerned about health and crime issues associated with Il sorriso and, after their complaints to the authorities went unheeded, they took matters into their own hands.

“The tension” said Tommaso Ippoliti, president of the Tor Sapienza Committee, “is skyrocketing. For years this neighbourhood has been abandoned, you cannot go out at night, and lately assaults and thefts have increased. A few days ago a girl walking her dog was molested in the park in mid-afternoon. As a committee we distance ourselves from the violence of last night, but people are rightly exasperated. We demand more security.”

“Police are scarce and the city has not responded to requests for more security and better controls of the migrant centres,” he added.

Burglaries, thefts from cars, physical attacks are of concern, but so is the deterioration of the area, including the poor lighting in the local park.

That’s why on 10 November about 150 people took to the streets for a spontaneous demonstration for “greater security in a neighbourhood overrun by immigrants,” and then the protest degenerated into incidents of urban warfare.

Subsequently, a rally of over 400 people representing more than a thousand local families was held on 11 November, leading to another protest outside the shelter. In the evening, 50 people launched cherry bombs, firecrackers and other objects — according to some witnesses even tear gas — against both the refugee centre and the police in riot gear permanently guarding the reception centre from the night before. Some cars were torched to stem the charge of the police aimed at dispersing the protesters. Two people, including a policeman, were taken to hospital with minor injuries.

Guests of the immigrant centre responded by throwing objects from their windows.

“It was a spontaneous action of some exasperated residents. It is not a question of racism, we’re just tired, we can’t take it anymore. In recent days there have been muggings, attempted rape and burgled apartments”, Ippoliti explains. “We are not extremists.”

There are at least three reception centres in the area, and a great number of immigrant squats and Roma camps.

The squalid public housing estate where the Italian protesters live, right in front of the modern reception centre for the immigrants, tells a lot of the whole story. Native residents rightly feel that a lot of taxpayers’ money is diverted into financing the business of “accoglienza” — welcoming and pampering foreigners — and not into addressing the pressing needs of Italians, at a time when Italy is undergoing its greatest economic crisis since the end of World War II.

The size of the crisis has led to cuts to local authority and welfare budgets, and buses are always too few and too crowded.

Tor Sapienza, on the eastern outskirts of Rome, is one of the worst suburbs of the capital, and often called a “dumping ground”.

It’s on this kind of peripheral neighbourhoods — the most affected by the crisis — that the burden of accoglienza is always shifted throughout Italy. In the central parts of town there are no refugee centres. The worse the area, the more negatively and seriously immigration is going to affect it.

Once again, as throughout the West, the costs of immigration fall disproportionately, if not exclusively, on the working and middle classes of the countries being inundated by non-European immigration, while elites can safely ignore the problems.

People of Tor Sapienza interviewed by Italian TV networks say that they are forced to go out in the morning carrying a knife for fear of assaults, and that in the area every 100 metres there is an apartment building of squatters while “our own people have no home.”

They say that men and women are unemployed. A girl says that she’s about to lose her job and her mother and brother are jobless, so she’s going to ask for the hospitality of the immigrant centre: 30 euros a day, accommodation, food, and cigarette voucher— not a bad deal.

Romanians have taken over the estate’s underground garages to live in. Why not? Police, says a man, never come to this area. Dozens of shop and market-stall owners have stopped business for fear of crime. Immigrants have even illegally built small houses.

Italians who don’t get the public housing they applied for are furious that immigrants get immediate accommodation.

They accuse the shelter’s guests of having taken over the children’s playground, which is full of broken bottles. A woman says that they defecate and urinate in public.

Still another reminds everyone of the complete lack of reciprocity when she says: “If I went to one of their countries they would kill me.”

“It’s not enough that immigrants walk around the estate on Viale Giorgio Morandi naked and throw things off balconies. Nobody can sleep because of the loud music,” complains resident Antonella Simoni.

No wonder the far-Right anti-immigration party Northern League reached 13% of preferences in the last opinion poll, for the first time becoming Italy’s third party, ahead of the 12.5% of Forza Italia, a party that was in government for many years, with its leader Silvio Berlusconi being Prime Minister four times.

The protest of Tor Sapienza inhabitants is not the first in Rome in recent months. In September another suburb, Corcolle, protested against a refugee shelter after a string of assaults on bus drivers.

In the end the reception centre’s guests in Tor Sapienza were transferred for their own protection to another suburb, possibly even worse, the aptly-named Infernetto , which has already declared it doesn’t want them.

The urban warfare surrounding Il Sorriso centre has attracted lots of media coverage in Italy, where the mob has been accused of racism.

The various suburbs of Rome have united in a city-wide Coordinamento di Ribellione comprising 45 neighbourhood committees, which organised a massive demonstration against the mayor Ignazio Marino in which the protesters were wearing Pinocchio masks of his face. “The people will take this country back!” was the slogan.

The unrest has spread not only to other districts of Rome but also to other Italian cities.

There is talk of a new Italian civil war. The media are now saying that this was just the tip of the iceberg, and that the difficult cohabitation between Italians and immigrants has led to the explosion of social tensions accumulated over the years.

The rage is also directed, among others, at nomads, gypsies, squatters and immigrant occupants of public housing. Italy, like Britain, has a serious housing shortage. Also, since it is part of the Eurozone, Italy — unlike Britain — is in an economic straitjacket, and many people can’t pay their rent.

Saturday, 13 December 2014

As the protest over his death has reached London, we can say that what happened to Eric Garner, whatever his faults, is certainly, tragically terrible. If I had been a police officer I probably would have stopped holding him down when I heard "I can’t breathe!", but then I'm not a police officer used to dealing with criminals lying all the time, including Garner himself who - as is shown in a distressing video that includes his altercation with the police before his arrest - had possibly been lying to the police until a few seconds earlier, when he was claiming he was doing nothing. It was probably a case of cry wolf.

And New York City policeman Daniel Pantaleo was supposed not to let go of Garner, it was his job not to do so.

Garner did not die from strangulation. According to city medical examiners, he was killed by neck compression, along with "the compression of his chest and prone positioning during physical restraint by police". The cops were holding him down by sitting on him, with an arm around his neck, which contributed to, but did not cause, his death.

Contributing factors were his obesity and various ailments, including bronchial asthma, heart disease, hypertensive cardiovascular disease. Without them, as Rep. Peter King said, he would not have died.

After Garner was handcuffed and had passed out, the police did no Cardiopulmonary resuscitation (CPR) on Garner because, they say, he was still breathing, and it would be improper to do CPR on someone who was breathing on his own.

The police maintain that, before Garner passed out, there was no reason to believe that he was in serious condition, because they assumed that, if Garner was unable to breathe, he would also have been unable to speak. The medical examiner found no damage to Garner's windpipe or neck bones.

He was put in an ambulance, where he suffered cardiac arrest, and was pronounced dead at the hospital about an hour later.

Why would a Staten Island grand jury not indict Pantaleo for murder or manslaughter in the death of Eric Garner? In a word, intent. Did Pantaleo intend to kill Eric Garner when he arrived on the scene? Did Pantaleo arrive intent on injuring Eric Garner? No and no.

Pantaleo was there to arrest Garner, and if he resisted, to subdue him and then arrest him. That was his job. Did he use a chokehold, which the NYPD bans, or a takedown method taught at the police academy, as his lawyer contends? That is for the NYPD to decide. The grand jury, viewing the video, decided that the way Pantaleo brought down Garner was not done with any criminal intent to kill or injure him, but to arrest him.

Garner’s death, they decided, was accidental, caused by Pantaleo and the other NYPD cops who did not intend his injury or death, with Garner’s asthma and heart disease as contributing factors. Now that grand jury decision may be wrong, but does it justify wild allegations of “racist cops” getting away with “murder”?

This reflexive rush to judgment happens again and again.

I think that the New York case - Garner's death - is more nuanced than the Ferguson one, but the grand juries' decisions were right in both cases.

Given the outrage that dominates much of the mainstream media over a grand jury's decision not to indict officer Pantaleo in the death of Eric Garner, here are 11 crucial facts about the Eric Garner case that the media are not going to tell you:

1. There is no doubt that Garner was resisting an arrest for illegally selling untaxed cigarettes. Former New York City Police Commissioner Bernard Kerik put it succinctly: "You cannot resist arrest. If Eric Garner did not resist arrest, the outcome of this case would have been very different," he told Newsmax. "He wouldn't be dead today.

"Regardless of what the arrest was for, the officers don't have the ability to say, 'Well, this is a minor arrest, so we're just going to ignore you.'"

2. The video of the July 17 incident clearly shows Garner, an African-American, swatting away the arms of a white officer seeking to take him into custody, telling him: "Don't touch me!"

3. Garner, 43, had history of more than 30 arrests dating back to 1980, on charges including assault and grand larceny.

4. At the time of his death, Garner was out on bail after being charged with illegally selling cigarettes, driving without a license, marijuana possession and false impersonation.

5. The chokehold that Patrolman Daniel Pantaleo put on Garner was reported to have contributed to his death. But Garner, who was 6-foot-3 and weighed 350 pounds, suffered from a number of health problems, including heart disease, severe asthma, diabetes, obesity, and sleep apnea. Pantaleo's attorney and police union officials argued that Garner's poor health was the main cause of his death.

6. Garner did not die at the scene of the confrontation. He suffered cardiac arrest in the ambulance taking him to the hospital and was pronounced dead about an hour later.

7. Much has been made of the fact that the use of chokeholds by police is prohibited in New York City. But officers reportedly still use them. Between 2009 and mid-2014, the Civilian Complaint Review Board received 1,128 chokehold allegations.

Patrick Lynch, president of the New York City Patrolmen's Benevolent Association, said: "It was clear that the officer's intention was to do nothing more than take Mr. Garner into custody as instructed, and that he used the takedown technique that he learned in the academy when Mr. Garner refused."

8. The grand jury began hearing the case on Sept. 29 and did not reach a decision until Wednesday, so there is much testimony that was presented that has not been made public.

9. The 23-member grand jury included nine non-white jurors.

10. In order to find Officer Pantaleo criminally negligent, the grand jury would have had to determine that he knew there was a "substantial risk" that Garner would have died due to the takedown.

11. Less than a month after Garner's death, Ramsey Orta, who shot the much-viewed videotape of the encounter, was indicted on weapons charges. Police alleged that Orta had slipped a .25-caliber handgun into a teenage accomplice's waistband outside a New York hotel.

Thursday, 11 December 2014

Why can't the majority of black people and the rioters accept that the reason blacks are much more likely to get into trouble with the police is because they are much more likely to commit criminal acts, both serious and petty, and the reason they are much more likely to be harmed is because of the way they interact with the police, resisting arrest or even assaulting the officers?

The question is rhetorical. They don't accept this because it's always difficult for every human being to recognise one's faults - or, as in this case, the faults of the group one identifies with. For rioters and looters there are added motives: regardless of whether they really believe that Eric Garner, Michael Brown, Trayvon Martin et al were victims of the police or of their own behaviour, they get a reward, material or psychological or both, from screaming and stealing.

Now the "protests" have come to London. Last night at the Westfield Shopping Centre (Europe's largest), in West London, demonstrators staged a "die in" over the death of Eric Garner and clashed with the police. 76 were arrested, which is an indication of the high numbers involved in this ridiculous pantomime.

But it wasn't just idiotic, it was deeply damaging. In such a bad economic climate, shops lost thousands of pounds of revenue from Christmas sales. And dozens of police and security guards were deployed, who could have been used to fight the crime that these "protesters" are implicitly supporting and now committing.

High-end stores and outlets at the shopping centre in Shepherd's Bush were forced to close, with terrified customers and staff barricaded inside, as no fewer than 600 militants staged a mass "die in" by sprawling on the floor in the centre’s atrium from 6pm yesterday. They chanted Garner’s last words as he was restrained by chokehold: "I can’t breathe!".

I wish we could easily gather so many people to demonstrate for worthy causes instead.

Several of these criminals "charged around" in front of terrified shoppers.

The arrests were for criminal damage and public order offences.

A Metropolitan Police spokesman said: “Shortly after 8.20pm, a group of protesters broke away from a larger group and attempted to force entry to the shopping centre assaulting security staff and causing damage to property... one man was further arrested on suspicion of assault."

A shop worker said: “It was pretty scary. They were charging around and we just didn’t know what would happen next. We thought, to protect everyone, we would lock the doors."

Witnesses commented that it was over the top.

Some questioned the point of the “die-in”, and a police officer told a demonstrator: “This is the worst protest ever. There’s no message.”

Monday, 8 December 2014

My friend and colleague Alessandra Nucci has translated this article from the Italian website Riscossa Cristiana.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

The policies enacted by the Orban administration, in defense of national interests against the world's great capitalists, are being fought by underhanded means and by resorting to street protests organized and financed by foreigners. The lie about the “internet tax”.

by Kovács Andras - Edina Karossy

The street demonstrations against the Orban administration which are taking place in these days are useful to the European Union and the United States who aim to carry out a coup d'état. Why? Because Viktor Orbán isn't doing their bidding. It isn't the Hungarian people who want to topple the government. Last April the government was re-elected to office by two thirds of the people! Our enemies are strangers to Hungary, who want to interfere with the inner workings of the country. They use well-oiled mechanisms, they are financed by George Soros and they will stop at nothing in order to preserve their power and their profits on the Hungarian market. They find traitors to our homeland – the opposition – who are willing to lend their support, for a price, and they appeal to “simple people” who believe them.

Viktor Orbán wants to tax multinational corporations who gain many benefits in Hungary but don't pay taxes, or pay very little. Besides this, they also exploit their employees, they take all their profits out of the country and then make it impossible for small and medium-size companies to operate. Prime Minister Orban also wants to tax the banks which, with foreign currency credits, have deceived thousands of families and ruined their lives. Orban has lowered the cost of electricity, gas and water and wants to continue to lower it, to further lighten the Hungarians' utility bills, but the providers of these services are Israelis who live in France and Germany and who do not want to lose any profits.

Another reason for contention lies in the potential gas pipeline that would come from Russia, bypassing Ukraine, through Bulgaria, Serbia and Hungary, and as far as Austria (the southern flow).

So you see it's a matter of damages to consolidated interests (the enormous profits risk being lower) by all these activities by the government. They find them annoying, which is why they interfere.

George Soros finances various organizations belonging to the opposition, as well as opposition leaders Gyurcsány Ferenc and Bajnai Gordon. Then we have André Goodfriend, American chargé d'affaires, who is extraordinarily active in the internal affairs of Hungary. Here, by the way, I would like to add that the same “Good Friend”, acting as Consul General in the years 2009-2012, did his best to bring down the Syrian government. And now he wants to tell the Hungarian people what to do.

They make up stories about fake corruption and make false accusations against the government – which they are never able to prove or witness to – mixing up the news, recruiting traitors among Hungarians who are ignorant and are ready to create a stir; after which they let the West know that the Orbàn government is unacceptable and that the 2/3 outcome in the elections doesn't count.

During the peace marches organized in favor of the government there was never any violence, any incident. Indeed, there was a particularly peaceful atmosphere, people sang and talked and were of good cheer. Quite the contrary of the current demonstrations against the Orban government, where there is evidence as to how some of the participants beat up some journalists, spit in their faces, destroyed the headquarters of the FIDESZ party (the party of the Prime Minister) causing huge damages; and they knew no limit in shouting curses and vulgarities. You can see the difference between the two crowds from a mile away, they are the opposite of each other, civility as opposed to incivility incorporated with anarchy.

This incivility was what also characterized the demonstration against the internet tax ”organized” by Gyurcsány Ferenc and by the people who are backing him, financed by Soros and which Goodfriend took part in. First of all the internet tax was a pretext, because without a motive that appears to damage almost everyone there would have not been so many people in the street at the request of Gyurcsány, whose popularity has lately taken a dive. Under the slogan “don't tax the Internet” he managed to move a small crowd. But the fact is that the bill of law said that the tax was to be paid by the providers and was not to be passed on to the users, and it was capped at 3 euros. But there are always people who don't know all the details and are ready to make a stir. So here you have your news fit to publish all over the world about how unhappy the Hungarians are and how unacceptable the Orban administration is, etc.

This scenario and succession of events are comparable to the coup d'état in the Czech Republic, where with the same methods they toppled the Necas government, and also to the events in Ukraine and those of the Arab Spring (Tunisia, Libya, Egypt, Syria). Unfortunately they always manage to camouflage their secret activities, while besmirching the image of whoever is against them, after which it is difficult for us outsiders, common people, to understand who was right.

This is why we must reflect on the news that is broadcast and consider events from different points of view. Otherwise we too will end up by believing our enemies.

For the moment we Hungarians who support the Orbán government do not intend to demonstrate, but await the development of the entire matter. If the foreign attacks do not cease, then it is our intention to take to the streets and show how close we are to our government, and how much we want to defend it.

It’s a very unusual work, in that, whereas critics of America are generally on the Left end of the political spectrum and those on the Right tend to unquestionably defend the “land of the free”, this is a criticism of the US from a non-Leftist viewpoint, indeed from a traditional, conservative, Christian, pre-Enlightenment viewpoint.

I don’t agree with everything the author says about America, but he’s such a brilliant philosopher in so many respects that whatever he writes is worth exploring.

Born in Russia, Alexander Boot became a nuisance for the Soviet authorities. Pursued by the KGB, he emigrated to the USA in 1973 and then to Britain in 1988, where he now lives.

I've been reading his blog almost daily since I've discovered it almost two years ago. When I found it I thought I had struck intellectual gold. Then I started reading his books. We’ve become friends.

You don't find many thinkers these days with Boot’s ideas, so he needs an introduction.

For a long time I’ve been unhappy with the lack of a constructive alternative to the new Left’s program. Islam is a major problem, but it’s only a symptom. Why did the West throw its doors wide open to it? What’s the disease of which Islamisation, multiculturalism, political correctness and all our other social evils are symptoms?

Boot provides the general framework we need. It's not just a critique of Islam, or socialism, feminism, environmentalism, "gay rights", the European Union, unrestricted immigration, the welfare state, public education, nationalised healthcare, our degenerate culture and corrupt political system, although it is all of these things.

Through his lens we acquire an answer and a reason for all the many ways we have arrived at the present surreal situation in which we are overjoyed at the prospect of being subjugated by Islam, are not unduly bothered by our future extinction as a race and collapse as a civilisation or worried about turning our countries into Third World outposts and our cities into replicas of Sodom and Gomorrah.

We need to understand where we went wrong, at what point we lost our compass - totally. The ideas about how advanced, enlightened, developed, free and prosperous our Western society is were obviously largely based on false assumptions if it all leads to the current Alice-in-Wonderland reality and suicidal urge.

Alex Boot identifies the crucial moments of this gradual process as the Renaissance with its humanist philosophy replacing God with man, the Reformation making everyone his own priest and turning Christianity into a subjective experience, and the Enlightenment sowing the seeds of totalitarian thought conducing to socialism, egalitarianism and Marx.

It's difficult at first, after the prolonged indoctrination transforming history and philosophy into tools of propaganda, to come to terms with Boot’s ideas of the superiority of the Medieval over the modern world.

But once I got going, I could write about nothing else. Each book I’ve published since, though perfectly capable of standing on its own, is but another chapter in an ongoing attempt to ponder the shattered temple [of Western civilisation], to understand why it was destroyed and by whom… Each of my books focused on one aspect of modernity, be it culture, religion or economics. This one is about politics, which in today’s West is dominated by totemistic worship of a mythological ideal that is misleadingly called liberal democracy.

This is how Boot sets the scene for his new book.

Democracy, he says, became deified. Like God, whose cult it has replaced, it's infallible and it cannot be questioned, only worshipped.

Boot is not opposed to democracy (in its etymological sense of rule by the people) but to unchecked democracy.

Among all systems of government that have existed, the one that most approaches Boot's ideal is Britain's historical constitutional monarchy.

"God, king and country" represents the Church, monarchy and Parliament.

In case of conflicts among them, the highest authority on earth remains the Church, accountable only to God.

The Parliament's division into two chambers is essential. The lower chamber, House of Commons, is the democratic part of the whole system. It’s elected by the people to represent their interests.

But it must be checked by other authorities: the monarch, whose power ultimately descends from God, and, in a fine balance between the monarch and the people, the upper chamber of Parliament, the hereditary House of Lords, composed of members of the aristocracy who, due to their historical ties to the land and territory, can be counted on to be able to go beyond their personal interest in favour of the public one. Importantly, their not being elected guarantees that they’re not corrupted and swayed by desire for votes.

This is why Boot views unfavourably the current moves to make the House of Lord more dependent on and controlled by elected politicians.

After what we've seen on both sides of the Pond, unelected power counterbalancing elected power seems the right solution.

Politicians’ giving people all they want even if it bankrupts the state and ruins the economy, namely an unsustainable welfare state epitomised by the free Obamaphone lady in the infamous video, is no less than a freebies-for-votes bribery exchange.

Not content with that, politicians have imported their own voters from other countries - Mexico and Central America to the US, Asia and Africa to Europe -, thus creating their made-to-measure electorate.

In the end, the "rule of the people" has become the final undoing of the people.

Boot is right on this. If this is not sufficient argument against democracy without proper checks and balances, I don't know what is. Unchecked democracy, not unlike communism, requires an unrealistic dose of trust in human beings.

A desirable measure would be to limit universal suffrage. Not allowing people who economically depend on the state to vote would reduce clientelism. Voting age should be increased.

Another point in Democracy as a Neocon Trick is that politically the West before the advent of the dreaded modernity comprised organic states that developed gradually, not through revolutions.

And, crucially, the central state had little power, which was taken over by the intermediary, local authorities like parish, guild, village commune, township and clan.

This reflects the relative importance that Christianity attributes to the state and the individual. The former is transient, the latter eternal. Christianity, therefore, has an intrinsic tendency to protect the freedom and dignity of the individual, with its spiritual value, against the power of the state.

What the Church called "subsidiarity" dominated the political scene: it was localism, the devolution of power to the lowest sensible level.

The West is synonymous with Christendom, it’s the part of the world that became Christian and built its entire civilisation on Christianity.

This polity centred around God. Its final purpose in every sphere, political, social, cultural, economic, aesthetic, was to make it as easy as possible for every individual to achieve salvation.

What about neocons, then?

Well, if democracy has become a religion (the American religion), and if Tocqueville - with his book Democracy in America (Amazon USA)(Amazon UK) explaining what the new religion was about and extolling its virtues - is its St Paul, neocons are, according to Boot, its belligerent missionaries.

He thinks that worship of liberal democracy has today become an ill-advised messianic policy aggressively followed by many Western countries but especially the USA and, to a lesser degree, Britain. And neoconservatism is the political movement mostly responsible for this urge to export democracy to every corner of the world with whatever means.

He compares neocons to Trotsky and his followers, who, through the concept of "permanent revolution", wanted (and still want) to make the whole world communist.

For him neoconservatism is a misnomer, as the movement has much more in common with socialism than real conservatism. “Cryptosocialism” would be better.

Both reject with hostility two millennia of Christian civilisation and want to create paradise on earth, using violence as utopians do.

In fact, as the Marxist striving for the perfect society has proved to be the most tragic and catastrophic failure in mankind’s history, so the neocon-inspired American policies in the Middle East have replaced unsavoury but secular regimes with fanatical Islamic ones, and unleashed the violent potential of that part of the world that the necessary tyrannies of the likes of Saddam, Mubarak and Gaddafi kept under control. And neocons are still at it, wanting to transform Syria into another Iraq.

And it’s not finished. Blinded by the adoration of purely superficial resemblances of democracy, neocons have been tricked by Russia - Boot's not-so-beloved country of birth - into believing that democracy vanquished, history ended and Russia can be a potential ally of the West.

Maybe Boot is not to everyone’s taste. To some, his criticism of the country that, unlike Europe, is still strong on Christian faith will appear harsh and unwarranted.

But his message still offers a lot to reflect on. It’s obvious that we are light years away from where we’d like to be, and that all the promises of rational Enlightenment have materialised only, at most, in the techno-scientific sphere. Even the economy, where we thought we would be strong and which, in a Godless and material world, attracted most efforts, has turned out to be a house of cards.

We really need to approach our problems from a completely different angle, as Boot would put it not physical but metaphysical.

Sunday, 7 December 2014

[T]he suppression of the minority of exploiters, by the majority of the wage slaves of yesterday, is a matter comparatively so easy, simple, and natural that it will cost far less bloodshed… and will cost mankind far less.

In the end, 66 million people were killed in the USSR between 1917 and 1959: tortured, shot, starved, frozen or worked to death. This figure was calculated by Professor of Statistics I. A. Kurganov and quoted by Alexander Solzhenitsyn in The Gulag Archipelago (Amazon USA)(Amazon UK) .

Others say that the figure is 45 million, still others 20 million. The lower figures may be due to the fact that they only refer to deaths caused by Stalin, and don’t include the pre-Stalin and post-Stalin periods of the Soviet Union.

None of them includes the tens of millions of deaths of the Second World War.

If 60 million were indeed killed from 1917 to 1959, an average of 2 million were killed during each year of Stalin’s horrendous rule – or 40,000 every week (even during “peacetime”).

If the real number is 20 million, that still means 1,830 deaths every single day.

And they were not just “the minority of exploiters”, as Lenin put it. They were peasants, workers, middle class people.

That eventually was the blood and human cost that Lenin considered “natural” and negligible.

It’s useful sometimes to remember the sources of the ideas of people who are currently in the political arena. It makes it easier to make sense of what they say, which at times would seem incomprehensibly against common sense.

Thursday’s Question Time program on BBC1 hosted among its panel Labour's MP and Shadow Home Secretary Yvette Cooper. On that occasion the Labour Party, Lenin's heirs, showed through their representative how to adapt the Bolshevik leader's ideas to our modern – for them regrettably less revolutionary and cloak-and-dagger - times.

"Kill the rich!" has been replaced by "Tax the rich (to death if possible)!”

After all, one of the first punishments that Lenin recommended just after the October Revolution was "confiscation of all property”, along with confinement in prison, forced labour and all the other niceties.

Lenin's grandchildren have to content themselves with 40-45 (50 at most when they are in government) per cent of people's income. How small and disappointing it must seem to them! But they bravely react to disappointment by pushing for more, as they always do on Question Time.

Some panellists on Thursday reassured us that the well-off will not feel the difference if more money is extorted out of them, sorry I meant top tax rates increase.

I suppose it must be the same way of thinking of conscientious thieves when they decide to burgle a wealthy household: steal the money where it is and where there is so much of it that its absence won't have consequences.

Ah the joys of democracy, where two wolves and a lamb can vote on what to have for dinner.

But what Labour doesn't disclose is that new and higher taxes initially introduced for top earners trickle down to the middle classes and even the working class. An example is the Stamp Duty tax, whose burden has increased on UK low and middle income families trying to buy a new home.

A couple of people in the audience claimed that they would be happy to pay more tax, if it helps children, disabled and such.

If they were telling the truth, the easy solution would be not that taxation is increased - as these people can't expect to impose their preferences on others - but that they give to charities. In that way they will be surer that their money does go to finance their chosen goal and not, like taxpayers' money, into redundancy payments of hundreds of thousands pounds, salaries for optimisers, facilitators, equality commissioners, communication officers, other assorted bureaucrats and various useless public sector employees.

One of the main reasons why anything run by the government is hopelessly cost-ineffective is because the state invariably employs many more people than are necessary for the job.

It does so because it's a way to increase its power, which is its main goal. The more public sector employees, the greater the public sector and the more people dependent on the state. That also translates into more votes. Parasitism and clientelism are the name of the game.

The broadcast ended on a humorous note, when a totally useless panelist (impossible to fathom why he was invited), the ridiculous - but unfunny – comedian Omid Djalili admitted that he hadn't understood the last question from the audience, but in all truth he hadn't got the others either.

Tuesday, 2 December 2014

A mysterious, early morning fire destroyed one of East Delhi's big churches, St Sebastian's Church in Dilshad Garden, prompting allegations of foul play by the Christian community.

Police have registered an FIR against unknown persons under section 436 (mischief by fire with intent to destroy house) of IPC.

The blaze started in the early hours of Monday and reduced to ashes the church's interior, including the altar, the Holy Bible, Cross and all images and statues. Several churchgoers stood outside the charred remains of the 13-year-old shrine the entire afternoon, protesting against what they believed was a planned assault.

Delhi archbishop Anil Couto has in a memorandum to PM Narendra Modi and home minister Rajnath Singh demanded a judicial inquiry into the incident. Couto also alleged that the police took a long time to react to the fire and were late in sending officers and forensic units to collect evidence.

Archbishop Couto, in his memorandum, demanded that the government must repair the building before Christmas, ensure that policemen guilty of dereliction of duty are punished and that special police investigation teams are set up to trace the guilty.

Members of various churches held a candle light vigil on Monday evening, and about 2,000 Christians protested outside the church on Tuesday morning.

A statement from the the Delhi Catholic Archdiocese said that the entire interior of the Catholic St Sebastian's Church, which was built in 2001, was reduced to ashes and that forensic samples retrieved from the inside of the church still smelt of fuel oil.

"The Christian community... and civil society have decided to protest at the offices of the police commissioner... to focus attention on the attempts to polarise the people in Delhi state, which goes to the polls soon, and the continued persecution of Christians in Madhya Pradesh, Chhattisgarh and other tribal and rural areas," the press release added.

Several phone calls to police officials went unanswered.

One of the first to arrive on the scene, around 6.30 in the morning, was the parish priest, Father Antony Francis. Another priest of the church, Father Stanley, said that there was an overwhelming stench of kerosene in the entire church when he arrived there, and explained: "Traces of it could be seen floating on water with which fire tenders had flushed our church. Undoubtedly this was planned vandalism."

Local Christians, about 1,500 families, recall one instance of vandalism against the same church. "In 2010, this church was stoned by some people. We still don't know why. So this assault is not new but is still terribly upsetting," said Roby Matthews, a regular at St Sebastian's.

Persecution of Christians in India is not new but indeed recurring, amidst authorities' inaction. Below is just a very brief, incomplete sample of past attacks.

RECURRING ANTI-CHRISTIAN VIOLENCE IN INDIA

Only a few days ago, some 25 Hindu fighters broke into the Calvary Apostolic Church congregation in the town of Bangarapet, in southern India, during a Sunday church service.

The church was vandalised, and 8 worshippers were injured in the attack, some seriously.

"The whole scene of a mob assaulting my believers was shocking and very frightening," described Pastor Robert Solomon D'Souza. "First they destroyed the furniture in the church and then started beating up believers who were gathered in the church for worship."

Last March, a court in India found 3 people guilty over the rape of a Catholic nun. The nun was raped by a Hindu mob in Kandhamal district, Orissa state, in 2008, days after riots caused by the death of a Hindu religious leader.

Although Left-wing Maoist rebels in the state claimed responsibility for the killing, hard-line Hindu groups blamed the minority Christian community for the death.

More than 30 people were killed in the anti-Christian violence, dozens of churches and Christian institutions were vandalised, and clergymen attacked. More than 25,000 Christians were made homeless by the violence.

In 1999, an Australian missionary and his two sons, aged 8 and 10, were burned to death in their car in the eastern state of Orissa following a Bible study class. In 2007, violence against Christians flared again in Orissa, with at least 3 people killed.

Monday, 1 December 2014

On 18 October, black 29-year-old Jermaine Jones was standing with a few friends on a street in Berkeley, next to Ferguson, Missouri, when he was shot dead.

Three witnesses - his black friends, also wounded - told the police that an unknown black male fired shots at them.

Jones’s sister, Margaree Dixson, was also fatally shot a half-mile away a few hours earlier, and the police suspect another unidentified black man for her murder too.

Why aren't Ferguson protesters who are holding banners saying "Black deaths matter" protesting these African-American siblings' deaths? Because they were caused by fellow blacks and not white cops.

Fox News contributor Deroy Murdock has created the chart above, based on FBI figures and research by University of Missouri–St. Louis criminologist and former LAPD officer David A. Klinger.

From 2003 through 2012, Klinger counts 1,265 murders in his city. In about 90% of cases the murder victims were black.

Among these 1,138 decedents, roughly 90 percent (1,025) were slain by other blacks. Klinger found 32 blacks killed by cops, with 22 of them shot dead by white officers. So, across 10 years, white cops killed a whopping 2 percent of St. Louis’s black homicide victims. Investigations indicated that all of these police killings were legally justified.​

“While I understand the people are concerned about the use of deadly force by the police, by far — about 50 to 1 — more blacks in St. Louis are killed by other blacks as compared to white police officers,” Klinger told KMOX-TV.

The largest-scale massacre of animals is not to be found in the Islamic world but - this may be a surprise for some - in Hiduism.

Perhaps we should think of this next time we hear that Eastern religions are good for animals.

What animal equality campaigners have called a "slaughterhouse under the open sky" and "the world's largest mass animal sacrifice" is a religious festival to honour the Hindu goddess of power Gandhimai, that was held over the weekend at her temple in the remote village of Bariyapur in Nepal, near the Indian border.

Sword-wielding Hindus poured into Bariyapur, where the Gadhimai killing started on Friday at midnight and lasted two days, Friday and Saturday.

On the previous occasion in 2009, the "festival" of blood attracted a million Hindu worshippers from India and Nepal and an estimated 300,000 animals were killed, either by having their heads chopped off or by having their throats slit. This year the number of animals massacred was expected to be over half a million.

It always begins with the ritual killing of five animals: a goat, rat, chicken, pig, and pigeon. Buffaloes are then slaughtered throughout the first day.

As animal campaigners say and common sense tells, the untrained butchers cause a great deal of suffering to animals.

On Friday, thousands of animals' dead bodies and severed heads started piling up in a large field near the village where devotees were carrying out the sacrifices. The reason for the bloodbath lies in the Hindu belief that the goddess Gadhimai, pleased through the suffering and death of these animals, will give their killers health and prosperity.

"It is very festive here, everyone is excited," maintained Mangal Chaudhary, the head priest at the slaughter site.

"It is very bloody... you can hear the animals moaning," Rameshwor Mehta, 50, who was waiting to offer his prayers, told the media.

Sita Ram Yadav, a 55-year-old farmer, said the atmosphere was "like a carnival". He added: "I am offering a goat to Gadhimai to keep my family safe. If you believe in her, she grants your wishes."

Manoj Shah, a 45-year-old Nepali driver who has been attending the event since he was 6, explained: "It is the traditional way. If we want anything, and we come here with an offering to the goddess, within 5 years all our dreams will be fulfilled."

Animal campaigners and human beings with a minimum of compassion have denounced the brutality with which thousands and thousands of animals find death in the Gadhimai festival.

The director of the Indian branch of the Humane Society International describes the scene thus: "Pools of blood, animals bellowing in pain and panic, wide-eyed children looking on, devotees covered in animal blood, and some people even drinking blood from the headless but still warm carcasses."

Animal Welfare Network Nepal was is in Bariyapur to protest against the barbaric ritual, while a campaign to ban the massacre has attracted support from British actress Joanna Lumley and French cinema legend Brigitte Bardot, who has petitioned Nepal's president to end the "cruel tradition" .

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About Me

Philosophy graduate, journalist, website creator and
blogger born in Italy and living in London. I have been London correspondent for Italian media, including Panorama, L'Espresso, La
Repubblica. I translated Peter Singer's book Animal Liberation into Italian.